


Finding You

by imaginationisrainbowcoloured



Series: Newsies Reincarnation [2]
Category: Newsies (1992), Newsies - All Media Types, Newsies!: the Musical - Fierstein/Menken
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Brooklyn, Denton as Dad, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Getting Back Together, Getting Together, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Katherine Plumber Pulitzer is a Good Friend, Love Confessions, M/M, Male-Female Friendship, Minor Character Death, Past Abuse, Period-Typical Homophobia, Reincarnation, Sheepshead Races, Spot Conlon/Racetrack Higgins-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:42:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27573980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imaginationisrainbowcoloured/pseuds/imaginationisrainbowcoloured
Summary: The Conlons moved from Ireland to New York when Spot was ten and he ran away a little under a year later. If you asked him about it, he would tell you that nothing particularly dramatic happened to push him to make that final leap, he would tell you that he had just decided that he had had enough of the fighting, the violence and the judgement and there, in New York, he found that he knew the streets in a way that he had never known his way around in Ireland.Race, on the other hand, had lived in New York his entire life. His parents had emigrated from Italy when his mother was pregnant, and he had been born in Manhattan. He spoke Italian at home and English at school, and his memories came to him as he was introduced to the people he had known before.
Relationships: Sarah Jacobs/Katherine Plumber Pulitzer, Spot Conlon/Racetrack Higgins
Series: Newsies Reincarnation [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1986400
Comments: 5
Kudos: 57





	Finding You

The Conlons moved from Ireland to New York when Spot was ten and he ran away a little under a year later. If you asked him about it, he would tell you that nothing particularly dramatic happened to push him to make that final leap, he would tell you that he had just decided that he had had enough of the fighting, the violence and the judgement and there, in New York, he found that he knew the streets in a way that he had never known his way around in Ireland.

  
To him, it was as if he had been there before and spent a lifetime learning how to get around in the easiest, quickest, safest way possible. This was, of course completely true. Spot didn’t know that though- unlike the Jacobs siblings, still several hundred miles away, he had repressed the memories of before and wasn’t aware that he had actually been in New York before.

  
Regardless of what he remembered, he ran away from the little home his father had bought and navigated the streets of Brooklyn, into Manhattan, with no conscious idea of where he was going. 

  
When the evening came, he found himself a back alley outside a small bakery to sleep in and dug through the trash until he found an oversized winter jacket- it was missing most of its fasteners, and there were a few rips in it, but it was warm and it covered Spot enough to keep him hidden. He slept there that night, fitfully and woken by every odd noise, flinching every time he heard footsteps or a door slamming. He was exhausted when morning came and the bakery’s workers began setting up for the day, and he was also starving. The bread oven was on and he could smell it baking; he hadn’t eaten in over 12 hours, despite being used to having three meals a day and it was beginning to hurt.

  
He curled up further into the coat and refused to cry.

  
“I think it’s a kid…” he heard a voice whisper, “we don’t know what to do,”

  
He sat up at that, noticing that the door he had been curled up opposite was open now, and he had obviously been asleep because the sun was much higher in the sky- he couldn’t run away, he would be noticed almost immediately. 

  
“Hey.” A voice said, from the doorway and Spot looked up into the eyes of a concerned man. A concerned man that part of him recognised, that part of him was convinced he could trust.

  
“Hi.”

  
“Are you hungry?” The man continued, holding out a paper bag, “I brought some food.”

  
Spot uncurled enough to lean forwards and take the bag, inside was a medium sized roll of bread and a croissant. “Thank you.” He said, stuffing the food into his mouth.

  
“Hey, hey not so fast,” the man said, leaning forwards to stop him shoving the whole roll in at once, “you’ll make yourself sick.”

  
Obediently, Spot slowed his chewing down, cursing himself for being so afraid of people that he would just follow orders without question. The man broke off bits of the roll and handed them to him, apparently not trusting that he wouldn’t just eat it at once.

  
“I’m Denton.” The man said, “Bryan Denton, I’m a teacher at the local high school.”

  
Spot knew that the man wanted his name, but if he gave Denton his name then he would be able to find his parents and send him back,

  
“Hey, hey.” The man said, for the second time, “I’m not gonna hurt you, and I’m not gonna send you back to wherever you ran away from.”

  
“What makes you think I ran away from anywhere?” Spot demanded, ripping the bit of roll that he had into smaller pieces.

  
“I foster three children,” Denton told him, “Niamh, Sophia, and Tommy. They’re all with me because they ran away from bad lives.”

  
“Oh.” The names were familiar to him in the same way that Denton himself had been, and now that Spot thought about it they were all familiar in the same way the streets of New York had been.

  
“I have a spare room.” Denton continued casually, as if they were discussing the weather rather than the fact that Spot had run away. “It’s yours if you want it.”

  
“You won’t send me back?” Spot asked, hating how small he sounded, “Even if they come looking?”

  
“I would never send you back somewhere you hated so much that you ran away.”

  
“Ok.”

  
Denton was true to his word with a vigour that Spot had not expected, he dealt with the police, he dealt with his parents’ lawyers and he fought tooth and nail to keep Spot with him. Niamh- Hotshot as she had introduced herself- said that he had done the same for all three of them, and then she had looked at him as if she was expecting that to mean something. It didn’t, but Spot was pretty certain that somewhere deep inside of him it did, and he just had to uncover that part.

  
*

  
Race, on the other hand, had lived in New York his entire life. His parents had emigrated from Italy when his mother was pregnant, and he had been born in Manhattan. He spoke Italian at home and English at school, and his memories came to him as he was introduced to the people he had known before.

  
He met Jack when they were both five, had called him Cowboy immediately, and both of them had remembered another time when they were both five and Jack had introduced himself as Cowboy. After that, the memories kind of grew as he aged, or sometimes if a major event happened, and he found himself with a group of friends who knew him better than he knew himself and a nickname that his parents hated. Not that it really mattered what his parents thought because they were both killed in a car crash when he was eight. 

  
Jack took him to Kloppman’s, Kloppman took him in, the state approved it and Racetrack found himself with friends that were more like family. An easy move from orphaned to in a home, much easier than some of the other boys’, even if he did sometimes find himself waking up, the memory of the crunch of the car and the screams of his mother at the front of his mind.

  
*

  
Race and Spot met when they were eleven, two weeks after Spot had moved into Denton’s alongside Hotshot, Smalls, and Tommy Boy, and that was the catalyst for Spot’s repressed memories to make their way back into the forefront of his mind.

  
“I’m Racetrack.” The curly-haired blond boy who was missing three teeth had said, sticking his hand out for Spot to shake, “But you can call me Race or Racer because everyone does.”

  
_“I’m Racetrack,” The other newsie had said, “But folks mostly call me Race or Racer, on account of I sell at the races.”_

  
“I’m Spot.” He said, shaking the hand carefully, and wondering why it had felt like something was missing.

  
_“Thanks for letting me stay then, your majesty,” Racer had said, grinning, and he spat into his hand and held it out to seal their business deal._

  
They had been inseparable for the rest of the day, since Spot had decided to stick by Race until he worked out why he could remember another version of Race, and Spot remembered that Denton had seen the two of them together and smiled like something made perfect sense.

  
“It’s time to go home, Spot,”

  
_“Sure,” Denton laughed, “you ask the governor to give you a ride home in his carriage.”_

  
“Alright, I’ll see you tomorrow, Race.”

  
“And the rest of us!” Jack yelled, “We’ll see you too,”

_“You know, Spot, sometimes I feel you only come over here to see Racer.”_

  
_“I do, Cowboy, shut up.”_

  
“Bye!”

  
They had left then, and Spot had turned around to glance at the entrance as Smalls and Tommy Boy ran ahead, fighting with sticks, and he was struck by the idea that it said the wrong thing.

  
“You’ll sort it out,” Denton told him, quietly, “It’s confusing at first, but you’ll sort it out.”

  
*

  
Two years later, Denton had proven to be correct, while sometimes one person would say something that remined him of one specific memory, he no longer felt utterly confused by them, and after Katherine joined, he had someone who actually wanted to talk about why they had those memories rather than just accepting them like everyone else did.

  
“I don’t know,” she said, taking a sip of her overpriced coffee, “I mean when I first met Jack, I looked at him and remembered the penthouse, and the ‘Hattan newsies in detail, and I remembered more about them the more of them I met- and same for you.”

  
“When I met Racer for the first time, I remembered meeting him for the first time last time.”

  
She nodded and pushed her hair back from her face- it was shorter this time round, shoulder length rather than long, but she still kept it pinned back at the front in the 1890s style. Spot had asked her why once and she had admitted that some old habits remained.

  
“It’s odd, though, I mean why only us, and everyone connected to us? Do other people remember past lives?”

  
“What are you gonna do, ask them?”

  
She laughed and shook her head, “Somehow I don’t think that would go down great.”

  
Talking with Katherine was nice; they hadn’t had any real friendship in the early 20th Century, so he was able to talk to her without the strong memories that he had connected to the others intervening, and she was logical when discussing the idea of reincarnation rather than jokey like the others.

  
“Mouth would know what to do,” he said, staring down at his now-cold hot chocolate.

  
Katherine nodded, mournfully, “Sometimes I find myself looking round for Sarah, but she’s not there.”

  
“I’m glad Racer is here.”

  
*

  
Remembering a past romantic relationship that they had had with each other hadn’t happened immediately, rather it had slowly slipped in alongside all other memories while Spot found himself more comfortable with physical contact with Racer until Race just sat in his lap sometimes without asking, and then he had kissed Race goodbye without thinking about it, and the memories had flooded in on his walk home.

  
_Sheepshead. The stables. A little alcove where they ate lunch._

  
_The docks. The water where they would both strip down. Kissing under the dock after dark._

  
_The lodging house. Spot’s private room. Holding him to his chest until they fell asleep. Waking up with him still there._

  
They never really addressed it, Race had just come up to him the next day, asked if he remembered and kissed him again when Spot said he did. It was natural. It was good. It was a little weird to be so public about it, and more than once he found himself stepping back whenever someone came into the room, but Race did the same. They grew more comfortable.

  
They didn’t go to Sheepshead anymore, nor did they go to the docks, but they had Kloppman’s like they had had the Manhattan lodging house, and they had Denton’s like they had had Spot’s private room.

  
“I love you.” Race told him, eyes fixed on the TV screen, “I did last time as well, but I couldn’t say it.”

  
“I love you too.”

  
_Whispering it into Race’s hair after he had fallen asleep, wishing that things could be different._

  
Saying it aloud whenever he wanted to because things were different.

**Author's Note:**

> Finally finished this  
> its been sitting in my todo pile for over a week  
> Kinda tried a new style with the italics so uhhh tell me what u think


End file.
